History

Palazzo Tiepoletto is a 15th century palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. 

Its four stories were built in Gothic and Renaissance styles: a water/ground floor with canal and courtyard entrances, Piano Nobile, and residential third floor or second Piano Nobile.

The current owners inherited the building in the 19th century from the Valier family, who inherited it from the Tiepolo family. 

The name Tiepoletto, "Smaller Tiepolo", refers to the larger 16th-century Palazzo Tiepolo Passi located to its immediate right.

Palazzo Tiepoletto, with reddish plasterwork on the upper floors, is a mixture of Venetian Gothic and Renaissance architectural motifs.

The ground floor portal is toward the left, not positioned in the center of the building. A smaller door to the right is still visible in Antonio Quadri's Il Canal Grande di Venezia (1831), and has since been walled up.

The first Piano Nobile has a central window with five Gothic arches and two pairs of single-lancet windows on the sides, all with denticulate frames. The the single-lancet windows have small balconies, lacking in the central window as a result of remodeling. 

The second Piano Nobile windows are located in the same position as the ones on the second floor but with round arches and with a single balcony on the three central windows. 

Originally, there was a single balcony also on the first floor central window, and no balconies at all on the second floor, where the windows had Gothic arches as on the first Piano Nobile. This can be seen in a 1722 painting by Canaletto, Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi towards Rialto, currently at Ca' Rezzonico.

Historically, the main entrance to Venetian palazzi was from the canal, but there was always a secondary access by foot at the rear of the building.

It is the lowest building among the palazzi located between the Rio di San Polo and Rio di San Tomà.

See also:

Edoardo Arslan, Gothic Architecture in Venice, London, Phaidon Press Limited, 1971, pp. 182, fn. 174; 349. fn. 57.

Alvise Zorzi, Paolo Marton, I palazzi veneziani, Udine, Magnus, 1989, p. 190 (with illustration).